The Mac Weekly

Issue date: 9/14/07 Section: News

Media Credit: Aaron Brown The Advancement office has drafted a pamphlet to appeal to potential donors. [Click to enlarge]

The impact of a donation to Macalester stretches well beyond the college's gates. Through supporting Macalester, benefactors are supporting the positive impact students will have on the world once their four years in the halls of undergraduate academia have passed.

That's the message the college is banking on as it prepares to go public with a push to add $150 million to its coffers over the next four years. An early draft of the promotional material the college will eventually distribute to potential donors dubs the capital campaign, "Through Macalester: Campaign for Macalester…and for a Better World."

Already, in the campaign's "quiet phase" during which Advancement staff-those who work in the college office dedicated to fundraising-have appealed to a small, core group of well-heeled donors for large contributions, the college has netted $68.9 million in donations and pledges toward the $150 million goal.

Contributions will underwrite financial aid scholarships, create endowed professorships, and, among other projects, help fund the construction of three facilities: the athletic and recreation center already under construction, a building for the college's new Institute for Global Citizenship, and a remodeled Janet Wallace Fine Arts Center.
Trustees-both past and present-have pitched in $39 million of the $68.9 million raised to date.

"You would expect that because we're in the quiet phase," Vice President for Advancement Tommy Bonner said in an interview last week. "They help set the mark. We do expect trustees to lead."
The capital campaign, the most ambitious in Macalester's history, will enter its next step, the public phase, in October of next year, he said. The college will have raised over half of the desired $150 million by that point, according to Bonner. Original capital campaign plans called for the public phase to begin in May 2008.

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